Studio visit with Christopher Adams
Part 2 of our look back with the author of Strong Eye Contact. +Previews of Adams other works; Tack Piano Heaven, Dog Book, Hyperlinks.
From late 2010 to mid 2011 I drew and painted the pages for Strong Eye Contact in two small rented houses in Tucson. I used the floor in the bedroom of the first and then a big wood desk in the kitchen of the other. I used watercolors, pens and crayons.
In early 2013 I scanned all the pages at my friend Conor Stechschulte's small rented house in Baltimore. We put the files on CDs and I mailed them to Raighne in a box of dirty socks. I designed the cover and other info pages on a computer on a different desk or maybe table in my own apartment in Baltimore just down the street. I used a donkey figurine, thread, cardboard, pretzels, markers and a Canon knockoff of Photoshop.
After making a couple more comics on that table in Baltimore1 I started working on a series called Tack Piano Heaven ( 1, 2, 3 ). Instead of working at a table I drew on a clipboard on my lap. I used graph paper, a non photo blue pencil to mark out strips for text and a technical pen.
From maybe late 2018 to mid 2020 I continued working on Tack Piano Heaven in the same way in an apartment in Portland. I also made a book of dog drawings called Dog Book using a graphite crayon on printer paper on a wood floor. I borrowed my friend Spencer Winans's computer to scan the pages for that book. I have not made any comics since then.
From May 2022 until May 2023 I worked on and off on a book of poems called Hyperlinks. I wrote it in the Portland apartment mentioned above and in a second just up the street. I used a lead holder and two identical A4 size notebooks on my lap on a small couch. I recently printed up a batch with a mom and pop digital print company in my neighborhood.
Strong Eye Contact has no dialog and no narrative text because I couldn't figure out how to incorporate any text in a way that made sense to me. The given language of comics didn't seem to do what it attempted to do. I did later figure out how to structure pages and incorporate text in a way that made more sense to me and utilized that for a few books. But now my most recent book is all text and no pictures. What a decade.
Strong Eye Contact by Christopher Adams
Published by 2dcloud
104 pages
$14.95
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Part 1 of this series starts here.
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